The Wolf in Winter Page 11

Morland wasn't about to let it go.

  'You could have taken care of it last summer.'

  Harry was fnding it hard to keep his smile in place.

  'I was busy last summer.'

  'Yeah?'

  'Yeah.'

  'Doing what?'

  'Making a living. Is this an interrogation, Chief?'

  Hayley Conyer intervened.

  'We're just worried about you, Harry. With this downturn in the economy, and the way it's hit construction, well, you're more . . . vulnerable than most. Businesses like your own must be suffering.'

  'We're getting by,' said Erin. She wasn't going to let her husband be cornered alone by these two. 'Harry works hard.'

  'I'm sure he does,' said Conyer.

  She pursed her lips, and then pulled from memory the semblance of a concerned expression.

  'You see, it's the job of the board to protect the town, and the best way we can do that is by protecting the people of the town.'

  She didn't look at Harry. She had her eyes on Erin. She spoke to Erin as though to a slow child. She was goading her, just as Morland had goaded Harry. They wanted a reaction. They wanted anger.

  They wanted an excuse.

  'I understand that, Hayley,' said Erin. She didn't allow even a drop of sarcasm to pollute her apparent sincerity.

  'I'm glad. That's why I asked Chief Morland here to look into your affairs some, just to be sure that all was well with you.'

  This time, Erin couldn't conceal her anger.

  'You what?'

  Harry placed a hand on her arm, leaning into it so that she felt his weight.

  Calm, calm.

  'Would you mind explaining to me what that means?' said Harry.

  'It means,' said Morland, 'that I talked to some of your suppliers, and your subcontractors. It means that, when the mood has struck me, I've followed you around these last few weeks. It means that I've had a meeting with Allan Dantree at the bank, and we had a discreet conversation about your accounts.'

  Harry couldn't help but close his eyes for a moment. He'd tried so hard, but he'd understimated Morland, and Hayley Conyer, and the board. He wasn't the frst to have tried to hide his diffculties, and he wouldn't be the last. He should have known that, over the centuries, the town had learned to spot weakness, but he had exposed himself by applying to the town's fund for that loan. Perhaps they'd all just been more alert than usual to strange patterns, to blips in behavior, because of the economy. So many folk were struggling in the current climate. That was why the board had acted. That was why they had taken the girl.

  'Those are our private affairs,' said Erin, but her voice sounded hollow even to herself. In Prosperous nothing was private, not really.

  'But what happens when private diffculties affect all?' said Hayley, still speaking in that maddeningly reasonable, insidiously patronizing tone. God, Erin hated her. It was as though cataracts had been removed from her eyes, the old clouded lenses replaced by ones that were new and clear. She saw the town as it really was, saw it in all its viciousness, its selfregard, its madness. They had been brainwashed, conditioned by centuries of behavior, but it was only when it arrived at their own door in the form of the girl that Harry and Erin had realized they could no longer be a part of it. Releasing the girl was an imperfect solution, the action of those who were still not brave enough to take the fnal step themselves and hoped that another might do it for them. The girl would go to the police, she would tell her story, and they would come.

  And what then? The girl would have been able to give them a description of Walter and Beatrix, and of Harry and Erin. All four would have been questioned, but Walter and Beatrix wouldn't have buckled under interrogation. They had been responsible for fnding and taking the last two girls, but they were now nearing death. They were as loyal to the town as Hayley Conyer, and they weren't likely to roll over on it in the fnal years of their life. At best, it would have been their word against that of Harry and Erin.

  They threatened us. They told us to get them a girl or they'd burn our house down. We're old. We were frightened. We didn't know what they wanted with the girl. We didn't ask . . .

  And Hayley Conyer, and the selectmen, and Chief Morland? Why, there'd be nothing to connect them to the girl, nothing beyond the word of Harry and Erin Dixon, who'd kept her trapped in their basement before leaving a door unlocked, and it could be that they'd done that only because they'd lost the courage to follow through on whatever it was they had planned for her. It would still have left them open to felony charges of kidnapping and criminal restraint, a Class A crime, or a Class B if the prosecution accepted that they'd voluntarily released the victim alive and in a safe place, and not suffering from serious bodily injury. It was the difference between ten years behind bars and thirty years, but it would still have been more time than either of them wanted to spend in a cell.

  And maybe, just maybe, someone might have believed their story.

  But, no, that was the greatest fantasy of all.

  'Harry? Erin? You still with us?'

  It was Morland speaking.

  Erin looked at her husband. She knew that their thoughts had been running along similar lines.

  What if, what if . . .

  'Yes,' said Harry. 'We're listening.'

  'You're in fnancial diffculties – far more serious diffculties than you chose to share with Ben when you asked for a loan – and you tried to keep them from us.'

  There was no point in denying it.

  'Yes, that's true.'

  'Why?'

  'Because we were ashamed.'

  'Is that all?'

  'No. We were frightened as well.'

  'Frightened? Frightened of what?'

  There was no going back now.

  'Frightened that the town might turn against us.'

  Now Hayley Conyer spoke again.

  'The town does not turn against its own, Harry. It protects them. That's the reason for its existence. How could you doubt that?'

  Harry squeezed the bridge of his nose with the index fnger and thumb of his right hand. He could feel a migraine coming on.

  'I don't know,' he said. 'With all that was going on, with all of our problems . . .'

  'You lost faith,' said Conyer.

  'Yes, Hayley, I suppose we did.'

  Conyer leaned over the table. Her breath smelled of mints and dying.

  'Did you let the girl go?' she asked.

  'No,' said Harry.

  'Look me in the eye and tell me true.'

  Harry took his hand away from his nose and stared Conyer down.

  'No, we did not let the girl go.'

  She didn't want to believe him. He could see that. Just like Morland, she had her suspicions, but she couldn't prove them, and the town wouldn't allow her to move against them without proof.

  'All right, then,' she said. 'The question is, where do we go from here? You'll have to make amends, both of you.'

  The pain was pulsing in Harry's head now, and with it came the nausea. He knew what was coming. He'd known right from the moment that Morland had arrived at their house with the body of the girl in the trunk of his car. He wanted to tell them of the dreams he'd been having, but he bit the words back. He hadn't even told his wife about them. In his dreams the girl wasn't dead. They'd put her in the grave alive, because dead girls didn't open their eyes. She was alive and scratching at the plastic below the ground, and somehow she had managed to tear through it and dig her way out, except when she emerged she really was dead. She was a being transformed, a revenant, and when she opened her mouth she spewed darkness, and the night deepened around her.

  'What do you want us to do?' said Harry, but he asked only because it was what was expected of him. He might as well have been reading from a script.

  Hayley Conyer patted his hand. It was all that he could do not to yank it away at her touch.

  'Find us another girl,' said Conyer. 'And quickly.'

  16

  Igot to the Preble Stree
t Soup Kitchen just as the dinner service was coming to an end. A woman named Evadne Bryan-Perkins, who worked at the Portland Help Center, a mental health and community support facility on Congress, had directed me to the kitchen. Shaky had given me her name as a contact person, but she told me that she hadn't seen him in a day or two, and suggested that he might drop by Preble Street for a bite to eat.

  Preble Street served three meals per day not only to the city's homeless, but to seniors and families who were struggling to get by on welfare. That added up to almost 500,000 meals per year, but the meals were just a starting point. By getting people in the door, the staff was in a position to help them with housing advice, employment and healthcare. At the very least, they could give them some clean, warm socks, and that meant a lot during winter in Maine.

  One of the volunteers, a young woman named Karyn, told me that Shaky had been through earlier in the evening, but had fnished his meal and headed back out almost immediately after. This was unusual for him, she said. He was more sociable than some, and he usually appreciated the company and warmth of the shelter.

  'He hasn't been the same since his friend Jude died,' she said. 'They had a bond between them, and they looked out for each other. Shaky's talked to us a little about it, but most of it he's kept inside.'

  'Do you have any idea where he might have gone?'

  Karyn called over another volunteer, this time a kid of about college age.

  'This is Stephen,' she said. 'He was one of the coordinators of this year's homeless survey. He might be able to help you.'

  She went back to cleaning tables, leaving me with Stephen. He was a tall young man. I pretty much had to lean back just to look him in the eye. He wasn't as open as Karyn had been. He had his arms crossed as he spoke to me.

  'Can I ask why a private detective is looking for Shaky?' he said.

  'He came to talk to me about Jude's death. I think he set tumblers falling in my mind. If I'm to take it any further, then there are some questions that he might be able to help me answer. He's in no trouble. I give you my word on that.'

  I watched him consider what I'd told him before he decided that I wasn't about to make Shaky's existence any more diffcult, and he loosened up enough to offer me coffee. Between the beer I'd had in Ruski's, and the coffee in Rosie's, I was carrying more liquid than a camel, but one of the frst things I learned when I started out as a cop was always to accept if someone you were trying to talk with offered you a coffee or a soda. It made them relax, and if they were relaxed then they'd be more willing to help you.

  'Karyn mentioned something about a survey,' I said, as we sipped coffee from plastic cups.

  'We're required by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to do a census of the homeless each year,' said Stephen. 'If we don't know how many folk need help, then we can't work out budgets, staffng, even how much food we're likely to require over the months to come. But it's also a chance to make contact with the ones who've avoided us so far, and try to bring them into the fold.'

  I must have looked puzzled.

  'You're wondering why anyone who's hungry would pass up the chance of a hot meal, right?' said Stephen.

  'I guess it doesn't make much sense to me.'

  'Some people who take to the streets don't want to be found,' he said. 'A lot of them have mental health issues, and if you're a paranoid schizophrenic who believes that the government is trying to kill you, the last thing you're going to want to do is turn up at a shelter where someone might start prying into your business. Then there are others who are just plain scared. Maybe they've gotten into a fght with someone in the past, and they know that there's a knife out there looking to sink itself into them, or they've had a bad experience with the authorities and now prefer to keep their heads down. So, for one night of the year, we go out in force looking under bleachers and behind Dumpsters, and we try to reach out. I mean, we're out there at other times of the year too, but the sustained focus of survey night, and the sheer weight of volunteers on the streets, means that we get a hell of a lot done in a few hours.'

  'So where does Shaky hang out?'

  'Shaky likes to come into the shelter, if there's a mat available to sleep on. He hasn't been in so much since Jude died, which means that he's either set up camp somewhere off the interstate, probably around Back Cove Park, or he's sleeping at the rear of one of the businesses on Danforth or Pleasant, where the cops can't see him. That's where I'd look.'

  He toyed with his coffee cup. He wanted to say more. I didn't hurry him.

  'Did you know Mr Jude?' he eventually asked.

  I'd never heard anyone call Jude 'Mister' before. He was always just Jude. It made me warm more to the kid.

  'A little,' I said. 'I'd sometimes put money his way if I needed someone to watch a car or an address for a while. He never let me down.'

  'He was a smart man, and a good one too,' said Stephen. 'I could never quite fgure out how he'd ended up in the situation he was in. Some of the men and women here, I can see it. There's a trajectory you can reconstruct. But not in Mr Jude's case. The best I can tell, there was a weak bolt in the machinery, and when it broke, the whole mechanism ground to a halt.'

  'You're not an engineering student by any chance, are you?'

  He grinned for the frst time. 'Know a man by his metaphors.'

  'You sound as though you liked Jude,' I said.

  'Uh-huh, I did. Even in the midst of his own troubles, he still had time for others. I tried to follow his lead by helping him in turn.'

  'You're talking about his daughter?'

  'Yeah, Annie. I was kind of keeping an eye on her for him.'

  'Really?'

  'Because of my work with the shelter here, I was in a position to talk to others in the same business. I made an occasional call to the Tender House in Bangor, where Annie was staying, just so I could reassure Mr Jude that she was doing okay. When she disappeared, I—'

  He stopped.

  'You felt responsible?'

  He nodded, but didn't speak.

  'Did Jude say anything to make you believe he felt the same way?'

  'No, never. It wasn't in his nature. It didn't help, though. It didn't make me feel any less guilty.'

  Stephen was clearly a good kid, but he had the egotism of youth. The world revolved around him, and consequently he believed he had the power to change how it worked. And, in the way of the young, he had made another's pain about himself, even if he did so for what seemed like the best of reasons. Time and age would change him: if they didn't, he wouldn't be working in soup kitchens and shelters for much longer. His frustrations would get the better of him, and force him out. He'd blame others for it, but it would be his own fault.

  I thanked him and left my cell phone number with him, just in case I couldn't fnd Shaky, or he chose to come into the shelter for the night after all. Stephen promised to leave a note for the breakfast and lunch volunteers as well, so that if Shaky arrived to eat the next day they could let me know. I used the men's room before I left, just to ensure that my bladder didn't burst somewhere between the shelter and Back Cove. An old man was standing at one of the sinks, stripped to the waist. His white hair hung past his shoulders, and his body reminded me of the images I'd seen of Jude's poor, scarred torso, like some medieval depiction of Christ after He'd been taken down from the cross.

  'How you doing?' I said.

  'Livin' the dream,' the old man replied.

  He was shaving with a disposable razor. He removed the last of the foam from his cheek, splashed water on his face and rubbed his skin to check that it was smooth.

  'You got any aftershave?' he asked.

  'Not with me,' I said. 'Why, you got a date?'

  'I haven't been on a date since Nixon was president.'

  'Another thing to blame him for: ruining your love life.'

  'He was a sonofabitch, but I didn't need no help on that front.'

  I washed my hands and dried them with a paper towel. I had money in
my pocket, but I didn't want to offend the old man. Then I thought that it was better to risk hurting his feelings. I left a ten on the sink beside him. He looked at it as though Alexander Hamilton might bite him if he tried to pick it up; that, or I might ask him to bite me as part of some bizarre sexual fetish.

  'What's that for?' he said.

  'Aftershave.'

  He reached out and took the ten.

  'I always liked Old Spice,' he said.

  'My father wore Old Spice.'

  'Something stays around that long, it has to be good.'